Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree

Deep Learning

Project: Build a Traffic Sign Recognition Classifier

In this notebook, a template is provided for you to implement your functionality in stages, which is required to successfully complete this project. If additional code is required that cannot be included in the notebook, be sure that the Python code is successfully imported and included in your submission if necessary.

Note: Once you have completed all of the code implementations, you need to finalize your work by exporting the iPython Notebook as an HTML document. Before exporting the notebook to html, all of the code cells need to have been run so that reviewers can see the final implementation and output. You can then export the notebook by using the menu above and navigating to \n", "File -> Download as -> HTML (.html). Include the finished document along with this notebook as your submission.

In addition to implementing code, there is a writeup to complete. The writeup should be completed in a separate file, which can be either a markdown file or a pdf document. There is a write up template that can be used to guide the writing process. Completing the code template and writeup template will cover all of the rubric points for this project.

The rubric contains "Stand Out Suggestions" for enhancing the project beyond the minimum requirements. The stand out suggestions are optional. If you decide to pursue the "stand out suggestions", you can include the code in this Ipython notebook and also discuss the results in the writeup file.

Note: Code and Markdown cells can be executed using the Shift + Enter keyboard shortcut. In addition, Markdown cells can be edited by typically double-clicking the cell to enter edit mode.

Step 0: Load The Data

Step 1: Dataset Summary & Exploration

The pickled data is a dictionary with 4 key/value pairs:

Complete the basic data summary below. Use python, numpy and/or pandas methods to calculate the data summary rather than hard coding the results. For example, the pandas shape method might be useful for calculating some of the summary results.

Provide a Basic Summary of the Data Set Using Python, Numpy and/or Pandas

Include an exploratory visualization of the dataset

Visualize the German Traffic Signs Dataset using the pickled file(s). This is open ended, suggestions include: plotting traffic sign images, plotting the count of each sign, etc.

The Matplotlib examples and gallery pages are a great resource for doing visualizations in Python.

NOTE: It's recommended you start with something simple first. If you wish to do more, come back to it after you've completed the rest of the sections. It can be interesting to look at the distribution of classes in the training, validation and test set. Is the distribution the same? Are there more examples of some classes than others?

Helper Classes and Functions

Classes to help in exploring and viewing data:

Instantiate Datasets and Viewer

Explore Some Traffic Signs

View signs in trainingSigns dataset sorted by type.

View Samples Sizes by Training Sign

Step 2: Design and Test a Model Architecture

Design and implement a deep learning model that learns to recognize traffic signs. Train and test your model on the German Traffic Sign Dataset.

The LeNet-5 implementation shown in the classroom at the end of the CNN lesson is a solid starting point. You'll have to change the number of classes and possibly the preprocessing, but aside from that it's plug and play!

With the LeNet-5 solution from the lecture, you should expect a validation set accuracy of about 0.89. To meet specifications, the validation set accuracy will need to be at least 0.93. It is possible to get an even higher accuracy, but 0.93 is the minimum for a successful project submission.

There are various aspects to consider when thinking about this problem:

Here is an example of a published baseline model on this problem. It's not required to be familiar with the approach used in the paper but, it's good practice to try to read papers like these.

Pre-process the Data Set (normalization, grayscale, etc.)

Minimally, the image data should be normalized so that the data has mean zero and equal variance. For image data, (pixel - 128)/ 128 is a quick way to approximately normalize the data and can be used in this project.

Other pre-processing steps are optional. You can try different techniques to see if it improves performance.

Use the code cell (or multiple code cells, if necessary) to implement the first step of your project.

Helper Functions for Pre-processing and Generating Additional Training Samples (Fake Data)

Examples of Brightening and Fake Generation

Generate Additional Training Samples

A total of 259,290 samples are used for training after adding additional training samples.

View Some of the Traffic Signs in Training Dataset

View Sample Sizes

After generating additional samples for training, the number of samples for each sign should be equal.

Pre-process Datasets

Brighten and normalize datasets.

Model Architecture

Helper Functions to Define Model Layers

Functions below help to create convolutional, pooling and fully connected layers.

Class Wrappers for Layers

Classes below wrap the helper functions above. A Keras-inspired convention is used in creating layers and models.

Class for Defining a Deep Neural Network

A base Model class and Sequential Model Keras-inspired classed are defined below. The base Model class is used to construct a multi-scale network then Optional section of this project. The more traditional Sequential is used to construct the main classifier for this project.

Model Architecture for Traffic Sign Classifier

The Sequential model is used to add the layers to develop the classifiers. Layers are added "sequentially" to the model.

The model architecture generally follows the LeNet architecture outlined in Lesson 13: Convolutional Neural Networks, Item 36. Lab: LeNet in Tensorflow.

A 1x1 convolution used in the very first layer has an output shape of 32x32x1. During development, this allowed the sequential model to improve validation accuracy as compared to training the model without it.

The other convolutional layers have the same first and second dimensions as the LeNet, but are deeper. The fully connected layers are wider with dropout added in the later stages.

Layers and respective output shapes are printed to verify architecture.

Train, Validate and Test the Model

A validation set can be used to assess how well the model is performing. A low accuracy on the training and validation sets imply underfitting. A high accuracy on the training set but low accuracy on the validation set implies overfitting.

Plot Accuracy over Epochs

Model achieved a validation accuracy of 98.8% at epoch 24. Plot below shows performace over full range of epochs.

Check Accuracy with Training Data

Accuracy should very high for training data.

Check Model Accuracy with Test Data

Model achieved a test accuracy of 96.5%.

Step 3: Test a Model on New Images

To give yourself more insight into how your model is working, download at least five pictures of German traffic signs from the web and use your model to predict the traffic sign type.

You may find signnames.csv useful as it contains mappings from the class id (integer) to the actual sign name.

Load and Output the Images

Predict the Sign Type for Each Image

Analyze Performance

Output Top 5 Softmax Probabilities For Each Image Found on the Web

For each of the new images, print out the model's softmax probabilities to show the certainty of the model's predictions (limit the output to the top 5 probabilities for each image). tf.nn.top_k could prove helpful here.

The example below demonstrates how tf.nn.top_k can be used to find the top k predictions for each image.

tf.nn.top_k will return the values and indices (class ids) of the top k predictions. So if k=3, for each sign, it'll return the 3 largest probabilities (out of a possible 43) and the correspoding class ids.

Take this numpy array as an example. The values in the array represent predictions. The array contains softmax probabilities for five candidate images with six possible classes. tf.nn.top_k is used to choose the three classes with the highest probability:

# (5, 6) array
a = np.array([[ 0.24879643,  0.07032244,  0.12641572,  0.34763842,  0.07893497,
         0.12789202],
       [ 0.28086119,  0.27569815,  0.08594638,  0.0178669 ,  0.18063401,
         0.15899337],
       [ 0.26076848,  0.23664738,  0.08020603,  0.07001922,  0.1134371 ,
         0.23892179],
       [ 0.11943333,  0.29198961,  0.02605103,  0.26234032,  0.1351348 ,
         0.16505091],
       [ 0.09561176,  0.34396535,  0.0643941 ,  0.16240774,  0.24206137,
         0.09155967]])

Running it through sess.run(tf.nn.top_k(tf.constant(a), k=3)) produces:

TopKV2(values=array([[ 0.34763842,  0.24879643,  0.12789202],
       [ 0.28086119,  0.27569815,  0.18063401],
       [ 0.26076848,  0.23892179,  0.23664738],
       [ 0.29198961,  0.26234032,  0.16505091],
       [ 0.34396535,  0.24206137,  0.16240774]]), indices=array([[3, 0, 5],
       [0, 1, 4],
       [0, 5, 1],
       [1, 3, 5],
       [1, 4, 3]], dtype=int32))

Looking just at the first row we get [ 0.34763842, 0.24879643, 0.12789202], you can confirm these are the 3 largest probabilities in a. You'll also notice [3, 0, 5] are the corresponding indices.

Project Writeup

Once you have completed the code implementation, document your results in a project writeup using this template as a guide. The writeup can be in a markdown or pdf file.

Note: Once you have completed all of the code implementations and successfully answered each question above, you may finalize your work by exporting the iPython Notebook as an HTML document. You can do this by using the menu above and navigating to \n", "File -> Download as -> HTML (.html). Include the finished document along with this notebook as your submission.

Step 4 (Optional): Visualize the Neural Network's State with Test Images

This Section is not required to complete but acts as an additional excersise for understaning the output of a neural network's weights. While neural networks can be a great learning device they are often referred to as a black box. We can understand what the weights of a neural network look like better by plotting their feature maps. After successfully training your neural network you can see what it's feature maps look like by plotting the output of the network's weight layers in response to a test stimuli image. From these plotted feature maps, it's possible to see what characteristics of an image the network finds interesting. For a sign, maybe the inner network feature maps react with high activation to the sign's boundary outline or to the contrast in the sign's painted symbol.

Provided for you below is the function code that allows you to get the visualization output of any tensorflow weight layer you want. The inputs to the function should be a stimuli image, one used during training or a new one you provided, and then the tensorflow variable name that represents the layer's state during the training process, for instance if you wanted to see what the LeNet lab's feature maps looked like for it's second convolutional layer you could enter conv2 as the tf_activation variable.

For an example of what feature map outputs look like, check out NVIDIA's results in their paper End-to-End Deep Learning for Self-Driving Cars in the section Visualization of internal CNN State. NVIDIA was able to show that their network's inner weights had high activations to road boundary lines by comparing feature maps from an image with a clear path to one without. Try experimenting with a similar test to show that your trained network's weights are looking for interesting features, whether it's looking at differences in feature maps from images with or without a sign, or even what feature maps look like in a trained network vs a completely untrained one on the same sign image.

Combined Image

Your output should look something like this (above)

Select and Preprocess Image for Network State Visualization

Generate Layer 0 Feature Map with Image

Generate Layer 1 Feature Map with Image

Out of Curiosity: Attempt to Replicate Multi-Scale CNN

Just out of curiosity, a multi-scale CNN is attempted.

Concatenation Layer

A layer that concatenates flattened layers is required.

Create Multi-Scale Architecture

The architecture is similar to the one Sermanet and Lecunn described in "Traffic Sign Recognition with Multi-Scale Convolutional Networks" where the output of the first stage is fed to the classifier stage.

Train Multi-Scale CNN

Plot Accuracy over Epochs

With a validation accuracy of 99.1% at epoch 61, the multi-scale CNN did a little better than the sequential model during training.

Check Accuracy with Test Data

Check Accuracy with Downloaded Traffic Signs

View Model Classifications of Downloaded Traffic Signs